Installing Windows 10 on the Dell Inspiron N5110

14 March 2016

So officially this isn’t supported by Dell. But it’s possible. This assumes you want to do a full, clean install. Perhaps your original HDD (the only source of the Windows 7 recovery partition) died.

First things first: You have to have the latest version of Dell’s BIOS for this laptop or Windows 10 will black screen after installation. Hopefully you stayed on top of driver updates and did this already. If not, here’s a way:

Use a Windows 7 Live CD or USB to boot into a normal OS (Safe Mode won’t cut it), insert the A11 media and run the executable. Click OK to start the flash and it will reboot when complete.

A clean Windows 7 install will not work as it’s missing some driver and nothing on the Dell driver website seems to fit the need. Meanwhile the clean Windows 10 install will go smoothly. If you need the Windows 10 media, it’s free from MSFT this time around. Of course you need a valid key and the one bundled with the laptop will not be sufficient.